Anwyll came walking toward him in some distress, with Uwen trailing behind. “Your Grace,” Anwyll began. “I beg Your Grace consider… we have wagons and gold in our charge…”

“And soldiers to defend them.”

“And the need to defend Your Grace. His Majesty gave me orders…”

“On the other side of the brook, I command. The men will only get wet and be unhappy. Or have to leave the wagons, which they ought not to do. Or will you prevent me?”

“I have orders to defend Your Grace.”

“But none to prevent me.”

“No, Your Grace.”

“Then there’s no good taking down the canvas, sir. The wagons and all the baggage can wait for master Emuin. We shall need men with us, enough here to guard the wagons, and we’ll take the best horses with us.” Now that he had seized command, the necessities of command took shape in him with perfect certainty. “No wagons, equipage like the Ivanim. One of the sergeants to bring in the column with master Emuin.”

A deep breath. A moment’s consideration. “Yes, Your Grace.”

It was done, then. Anwyll went off; Uwen, too, with increasing enthusiasm for moving quickly. To equip like the Ivanim meant every cavalryman with his remount at lead, and though it was not the Guelen habit, the Guard who had been at Lewenbrook knew what was meant. Anwyil had offered no objections to that aspect of his orders at all, and in a very short time, with a brief commotion in the camp—shouting up and down, personal baggage stowed in wagons and horses traded about until those men to go had no encumbrance but their weapons and the fastest and best horses to carry them—they were ready.

That meant Dys and Cassam and their grooms stayed behind, too; they were not the horses for a race. Uwen chose Liss and Gia. Tristen chose high-spirited Gery for the start of their ride, and Petelly to go at lead.

“Banner-bearers!” Anwyil ordered. “Forward!” And the standard-bearers rode first into the cold, ice-rimmed water. Tristen followed, with Uwen, Anwyil overtaking them to make a third as they crossed. Water came not quite over the stirrups, splashed and chilled where it struck. Horses’ breath steamed in the early sunlight as the bottom began to rise, as they rode dripping out of Assurnbrook into Amefel.

“Your Grace,” Anwyil said, when they had reached that ground, “you are now in your province.”

“And will be in Henas’amef tonight,” he said, but it seemed to him Anwyil doubted that part of it.

Time after that, however, seemed to him at last to move at an acceptable rate, not creeping along at the somnolent pace of the wagons. The road led up the brushy shore, past the ruins, to the Amefel he remembered, a gently undulating meadowland, low wooded hills all about.

In another hour the road itself, overgrown with dry weeds and likely little used since summer’s end, showed droppings of sheep and goats, occasionally those of cattle, traces of varying ages. At one and another place throughout the morning the sheep-traces they met crossed the road and led off to well-worn trails. Shepherds and farmers used the common land and paid their taxes to Henas’amef, and such tracks went to villages full of peaceful folk, little concerned with the affairs of lords and kings except as it affected their taxes, their sheep, their sons being called to war or left at peace.

Such things mattered, in the accounting he had to give hereafter.

If it meant replacing the lord viceroy without the show and ceremony the viceroy might have preferred, still, everything that protected the villages and the shepherds in these hills was reeling and slipping, and had been since the lightning stroke let the rain into the Quinaltine.

“Ye seem so grim, lad,” Uwen said when they were at a momentary rest. “Is summat amiss?”

He considered the question, standing, staring, with his hands on Gery’s side. He shook his head then. “No. Less so now. But the messenger will be there by now.”

“Aye, m’lord, that he will. Is that a concern?”

He considered that, too, and nodded slightly. “It may be. I feel things out of balance, Uwen, but steadier than they were.”

Uwen gazed at him as Uwen would when he was considering a difficult point.

“Lad,” Uwen said, “is there wizards afoot?”

It was a third good question. “Always,” he said. “Always, for me, there might be wizards.”

CHAPTER 4

The banners flew, in the hands of men who had chosen to bear them, in the land they protected. Far away a curl of smoke reported some blacksmith’s fire, some sign of work across the land: it was an odd time for cooking fires.

Just after noon they reached Maudbrook, which would have been their stop tonight, had they kept the wagons with them, and where Emuin would camp, likely tomorrow night. The thick planks thundered beneath them as they passed easily over Maudbrook Bridge… not a bridge for the wagons: the wagons when they came would use the ford and cross far more slowly.

It was a succession of hills after that, sheep-grazed, tree-crowned, rocky and rough. The streams were a brisk jog across, the brushy sides of the road offered no surprises more than a flight of startled birds and the occasional fox or scuttling hare, invisible but for a whisk of gray. Deer stared from the far distance, alarmed at such haste, but unsure what they ought to do.

They reached the next bridge, a wood-and-stone one, had a cold supper sitting on the margin beside it, with fresh water to drink if they walked down a little. The fires of a village in the distance this time were more numerous, evening fires, chimneys sending up advisement of other folk at supper.

It was Ardenbrook, so they all agreed, and this streamside would have been their second camp in Amefel, with yet another night on the road to spend and another day’s travel before them, if not more, asking nothing of the villages. They had in one day’s riding made up two days as the oxcarts measured time, even pressing hard; and the men might rightfully look to sit and have their supper, such as it was, with a warm fire for the night. A full two days closer to Henas’amef than anyone in the town could expect, they had gained time on the king’s messenger. Tristen saw the weary horses, saw the looks of men who hoped that they might have had the order to make camp.

“We go on,” he said, and said it louder, so all the men could hear, not only Anwyll. “We go on. We will camp in sight of the town, if then. It is needful.”

There was no muttering, only looks, fearful looks and weary looks, and he had no complaint from Captain Anwyll, either, only a shake of the head as if he thought better, knew better, had intended better, and was dissatisfied.

The horses, too, laid back their ears, puffing against the girths, unwilling, now, to be taken another distance on the road. Petelly was the horse for this last, hard effort; and he sighed and hung his head and stood on three feet, weary and uncooperative.

But back to the road again it was, with the sun lowering in the sky. They struck a steady pace, went on until the sun was a recent memory on the horizon.

Then, in that last wan light, the landmarks were all familiar ones, and the men’s spirits began to rise again as a sergeant pointed out a stone outcrop, another saying he knew the lightning-blasted tree at the bottom of the hill, and that there was a sheepfold in the hills yonder, and they were not, after all, that far from the capital.

Petelly suddenly knew where he was, Tristen became sure of it. At a time when the other horses, out of Guelen stables, had become weary, sullen, and inclined to go slower and slower, Petelly suddenly put his ears up and redoubled his pace, nostrils wide, knowing there was a stable, and grain. Gia and Gery, likewise stabled in the citadel this summer, seemed to take the notion from Petelly, and they picked up speed. The other horses, horselike, took their pace from them until the whole company was moving far, far faster than would have been likely after a long day’s effort.